While I wait for the lights to go out

It's been a weird 24 hours or so. Everyone was preparing for the hurricane yesterday, so I did too, and a bit more this morning. And everyone I know up and down the coast has been off school and/or work today, which was generally announced last night. So I've spent all of this time trying to get stuff done before the power goes out. Now according to the Globe there are over 350,000 people in Massachusetts without power, but so far I've had a nice quiet productive day. It just feels a bit weird, like I've been rushing to get stuff done when in fact I apparently had plenty of time.

Good to be productive though. I've been watching films and reading articles in preparation for the presentation I'm giving next week about Haskell Wexler. He is a cinematographer most famous in the 60s and 70s, but still working today. His influential work, and the reason why I'm learning about him, is from the late 60s and it's been pretty interesting. I'll probably do a whole blog post about him later as practice for getting my thoughts in order for the presentation.

Here's what's interesting now though: I'm reading all these trade journals from the 60s and so things we're studying now as history they've only just lived through. I'm reading an article about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf from Film Quarterly in Autumn 1966 and he says "It used to be thought that such wordless scenes = Cinema while dialogue scenes = Canned Theater. After three decades of sound film, we know these equations are false." You wouldn't call sound new at that point, but it was apparently new enough that people still gave thought to the impact of sound in film. That is a sentence that I can't imagine being written now. I find it very interesting to learn what was on people's minds back when it was just here's what I'm thinking about as opposed to a historian's interpretation of what people found important. This writer is a literary/film critic so he is kind of academic in that sense, but he's not a historian. At first I thought this project was going to be more difficult because there aren't books written about Wexler so I have to just go back to the trade journals of the day. Now that I'm doing it I realize that's the perfect thing to fit my temperament.